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Saturday, November 8, 2014

State of Emergency and Worsening Boko Haram Insurgency

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

In Nigeria’s northeast, which has been under
emergency rule for more than a year, every single day is worse than the
previous day. Boko Haram’s reign of terror persists and escalates with inexorable
ruthlessness. The masses of our people there continue to endure unspeakably
unrelieved suffering. Every day keeps getting worse. And there doesn’t seem to
be any hope in sight.

We wake up
every day to news of the loss of large swaths of Nigerian territory to Boko
Haram. As I write this, at least eight of the 27 local governments in Borno
State are now in the firm, brutal control of Boko Haram. If the experience of
the immediate past is any guide, it can only get worse.

The latest tragedy is that Mubi, Adamawa State’s
second largest town and hometown of Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff Alex
Badeh, is now under Boko Haram’s control. The city has been renamed
“Madinatul Islam.” Gombe State is also now under attack by Boko Haram.

It can’t get any more hopeless than this. This is
the nadir, the absolute ground-zero of despair and helplessness. Yet all this
is happening while the northeast is supposed to be under a “state of
emergency.” Curiously, nobody seems to be talking about this: about the fact
that President Goodluck Jonathan’s “emergency rule” in the northeast seems to
be emboldening Boko Haram and exacerbating the chaos and anomie in the region.
What is the point of a “state of emergency” if it only worsens the conditions
it purports to be designed to contain?

It is apparent that the president doesn’t, as he
likes to say on national television, “give a damn.” Amid the heartrending
humanitarian disaster that Boko Haram has wreaked on Mubi, the president chose
to travel to Burkina Faso to “resolve” the country’s political crisis. Which
sane person goes to put out another person’s fire while his house is up in
flames? I have never seen a more cruelly insensitive and clueless response to a
grave national crisis than this in my entire life.

In the next few weeks, the “state of emergency” in
the northeastern states will expire. Given the astonishing imbecility of this
government, I won’t be shocked if it writes to the National Assembly to ask for
a fourth extension of the “emergency rule”! That would, of course, be demented
in the extreme, but this government is capable of the most unimaginably stupid
things.

In light of the possibility that the government
would ask for an extension of its incompetent and counterproductive “emergency
rule” yet again, I reproduce below an abridged version of my May 17, 2014
column titled “The Insanity of Extending State of Emergency in the North-east.”
Enjoy:

“I learned early this week that President Goodluck
Jonathan has written to the National Assembly to request the approval of a
third (!) extension of the emergency rule in the northeastern states of Borno,
Yobe and Adamawa. I won’t mince my words: this is straight-out insane. A
popular epigram says ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but
expecting different results.’ Emergency rule in these three northeastern states
has done nothing to contain or countermine the sanguinary fury of Boko Haram.
In fact, it seems to have escalated it. No one contests that fact. It is utter
insanity to repeat three times in a row the same thing that has proved to be
ineffectual.

“It was during the state of emergency that scores of
students were slaughtered in their sleep and their dorms set ablaze in Yobe State.
It was during the same state of emergency that hundreds of female students were
brazenly abducted in Chibok, Borno State, prompting mass outrage the world
over. As Abdullahi Bego, the Yobe State governor’s spokesman, said in a recent
news release, ‘over the six months of emergency rule and later over the second,
we have seen some of the worst attacks by Boko Haram in Yobe State. From GSS
Damaturu to GSS Mamudo to College of Agriculture Gujba and FGC Buni Yadi, more
than 120 students were killed by insurgents. There were many other attacks in
Gujba and Damaturu local governments.’

“Yet President Jonathan wants to elongate the
emergency rule in the northeast by another six months. That, right there, is
the very definition of insanity. Call it government by insanity, if you like.
The state of emergency may not in and of itself be responsible for the
escalation of violence in the northeast in the past six months, but it
certainly has not lived up to its promise. A sane government would devise a
different strategy.

“I was one of the first people to applaud the
declaration of state of emergency in the northeast last year. (See my May 25,
2013 column titled ‘The Malcolm Xian Logic in Jonathan’s Praiseworthy Boko Haram Offensive’). I thought it was the best option to neutralize and rout out
the homicidal maniacs called Boko Haram. It has become apparent, however, that
the state of emergency in these states hasn’t worked and is unlikely to work,
not least because we have seen a disturbing uptick in violence in the wake of
the emergency rule.

“What’s particularly tragic in all of this is that
the Jonathan administration doesn’t seem to know what it actually means to
declare a state of emergency in a part of the country. I thought this was
elementary knowledge. The declaration of a state of emergency in a state
effectively relieves state governors of the responsibility to superintend over
the security of their states, yet the Jonathan administration, at every turn,
blames the Borno State governor for the unprecedented abduction of nearly 300
school girls. The federal government wants to have its cake and eat it. That’s
childish.”

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award. He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student. He writes a weekly column for the Nigerian Tribune. His research has won top awards. Read more about him here: https://www.farooqkperogi.com/p/about-me.html